This chapter critically explores the news and journalistic discourses surrounding the concept of the role model in the UK. It draws upon news content and semi-structured interviews with journalists from a wider study commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government exploring the media image of Black young men and boys in 2009-10. Analysis demonstrates negatively stigmatising discourses at play in role model news and polarised attitudes towards role models among journalists' reflections. Post-Marxist discourse theory is employed to argue that rather than challenging the complex social inequalities facing young Black men as recent government policy suggests, role modelling as a 'technology of the self' is likely to articulate neoliberal logic and reinforce existing social inequalities

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